•  38
    Probabilité conditionnelle et certitude
    Dialogue 36 (1): 69-. 1997.
    Personal probability is now a familiar subject in epistemology, together with such more venerable notions as knowledge and belief. But there are severe strains between probability and belief; if either is taken as the more basic, the other may suffer. After explaining the difficulties of attempts to accommodate both, I shall propose a unified account which takes conditional personal probability as basic. Full belief is therefore a defined, derivative notion. Yet we will still be able to picture …Read more
  •  20
    Propositional attitudes in weak pragmatics
    Studia Logica 38 (n/a): 365. 1979.
    Sentences attributing beliefs, doubts, wants, and the like have posed a major problem for semantics. Recently the pragmatic description of language has become more systematic. I shall discuss the formalization of pragmatics, and propose an analysis of belief attribution that avoids some main problems apparently inherent in the semantic approach.
  •  377
    On McMullin’s Appreciation of Realism Concerning the Sciences
    Philosophy of Science 70 (3): 479-492. 2003.
    Constructive empiricism is indeed set squarely within a common sense realism that was foreign to much of the empiricist tradition. But I do not see this common sense realism, which I take myself to share with many scientific realists, as harboring or leading to scientific realism. That is in part because of the way I separate the opposition between empiricist and realist understanding of science from other issues that divide us in epistemology. This discussion brought to light our quite differen…Read more
  •  8
    On Free Description Theory
    with Karel Lambert
    Mathematical Logic Quarterly 13 (15): 225-240. 1967.
  •  82
    On Massey's explication of grünbaum's conception of metric
    Philosophy of Science 36 (4): 346-353. 1969.
    Professor Massey's exposition and analysis [5] of Professor Grünbaum's writings on metric aspects of space seem to me both very helpful in understanding those writings and to contain a considerable original contribution to the subject. Nevertheless I would like to argue that there is an alternative to Massey's explication which seems to me more faithful to Grünbaum's remarks; it seems at least to have the virtue of not forcing Grünbaum to reject the usual mathematical definitions of the notions …Read more
  •  79
    One hundred and fifty years of philosophy
    Topoi 25 (1-2): 123-127. 2006.
    Looking back from 2049 over one-hundred and fifty years of philosophy, a student's essay reveals what became of rival strands in Western philosophy – with a sidelong glance at the special Topoi issue on the theme “Philosophy: What is to be Done?” that was published almost half a century earlier.
  •  197
    In recent papers Hans Halvorson has offered a critique of the semantic view of theories, showing that theories may be the same although the corresponding sets of models are different and, conversely, that theories may be different although the corresponding sets of models are the same. This critique will be assessed, first, as it pertains to issues concerning scientific models in the empirical sciences and, second, independent of any concern with empirical science.
  •  86
    Meaning relations among predicates
    Noûs 1 (2): 161-179. 1967.
  •  75
    Objectivity, invariance, and convention: Symmetry in physical science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 40 (1): 84-87. 2009.
  •  64
    Meaning relations and modalities
    Noûs 3 (2): 155-167. 1969.
    Modalities explained through the idea of a logical space
  •  49
    Logical Structure In Plato's "Sophist"
    Review of Metaphysics 22 (3): 482-498. 1969.
    The most important point about Plato's terminology in the Sophist is Cornford's: "Plato, here as elsewhere, wisely refuses to let any one metaphor to harden into a technical term." Since the wisdom of this course of action rests on the degree to which it satisfies Plato's purposes, we may not be disrespectful in hardening these metaphors for the purposes of our discussion.
  •  140
    Modeling and Measurement: The Criterion of Empirical Grounding
    Philosophy of Science 79 (5): 773-784. 2012.
    A scientific theory offers models for the phenomena in its domain; these models involve theoretical quantities, and a model's structure is the set of relations it imposes on these quantities. A fundamental demand in scientific practice is for those quantities to be clearly and feasibly related to measurement. This demand for empirical grounding can be articulated by displaying the theory-dependent criteria for a procedure to count as a measurement and for identifying the quantity it measures.
  • Lois et symétrie: coll. « Mathésis »
    with Catherine Chevalley and Hourya Sinaceur
    Les Etudes Philosophiques 3 405-407. 1996.
  •  46
    Michel Ghins on the Empirical Versus the Theoretical
    Foundations of Physics 30 (10): 1655-1661. 2000.
    Michel Ghins and I are both empiricists, and agree significantly in our critique of “traditional” empiricist epistemology. We differ however in some respects in our interpretation of the scientific enterprise. Ghins argues for a moderate scientific realism which includes the view that acceptance of a scientific theory will bring with it belief in the existence of all those entities, among the entities the theory postulates, that satisfy certain criteria. For Ghins these criteria derive from the …Read more
  •  115
    A recent article argues that the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics does not do justice to immediately repeated non-disturbing measurements. This objection has been raised before, but the article presents it in a new, detailed, precise form. I show that the objection is mistaken.
  •  701
    Laws and symmetry
    Oxford University Press. 1989.
    Metaphysicians speak of laws of nature in terms of necessity and universality; scientists, in terms of symmetry and invariance. In this book van Fraassen argues that no metaphysical account of laws can succeed. He analyzes and rejects the arguments that there are laws of nature, or that we must believe there are, and argues that we should disregard the idea of law as an adequate clue to science. After exploring what this means for general epistemology, the author develops the empiricist view of …Read more
  •  5
    Lois et symétrie
    Vrin. 1994.
    Bas C. Van Fraassen. PRÉSENTATION Bas van Fraassen est l'un des philosophes les plus respectés, ainsi que l'un des plus discutés actuellement, dans la philosophie des sciences de tradition analytique. Hollandais d'origine, Canadien de ...
  •  30
    La fin de l'empirisme?
    Revue Philosophique De Louvain 98 (3): 449-479. 2000.
  • Introduction
    In C. Van Fraassen Bas (ed.), The scientific image, Oxford University Press. 1980.
    The opposition between empiricism and realism with respect to science is old: it appeared clearly in the seventeenth century sense of superiority of the ‘mechanical philosophy’ to Scholastic metaphysics, and continued for the next three centuries’ debates over the philosophical foundations of physics. Empiricist views developed by the logical positivists of Vienna and Berlin were defeated by the emergence of scientific realism in the mid‐twentieth century. This defeat was largely due to the inad…Read more
  •  1
    Logic and Philosophy of Science
    Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 27 (2). 2010.
  •  214
    From Vicious Circle to Infinite Regress, and Back Again
    PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1992 6-29. 1992.
    The attempt to formulate a viable empiricist and non-foundationalist epistemology of science faces four problems here confronted. The first is an apparent loss of objectivity in science, in the conditions of use of models in applied science. The second derives from the theory-infection of scientific language, with an apparent loss of objective conditions of truth and reference. The third, often cited as objection to The Scientific Image, is the apparent theory-dependence of the distinction betwe…Read more
  • Informe sobre los condicionales
    Teorema: International Journal of Philosophy 6 (1): 5. 1976.
  •  5
    Hidden variables in conditional logic
    Theoria 40 (3): 176. 1974.
  •  36
    Gentlemen's Wagers: Relevant logic and probability
    Philosophical Studies 43 (1): 47-61. 1983.